“Terror Plot” Soldier Naser Abdo Defiant, Weinstein Equivocates

Abdo…refused to stand up during Friday’s hearing when everyone in the court was asked to rise for the judge.

As he was being led out of the courtroom, he yelled out “Iraq 2006” and the name of the 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was raped and murdered in 2006 by a U.S. soldier. He then shouted: “Nidal Hasan Fort Hood 2009.”

Organizations that had previously supported Abdo in his objector application have now disavowed him:

“If any of these allegations are true, any sort of violence toward anyone goes completely against what a conscientious objector believes,” said Jose Vasquez, executive director of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Another group, Courage to Resist, said in a statement that it had removed Abdo’s profile from its website. It said it has paid $800 of Abdo’s legal fees in the conscientious objector case.

Courage to Resist appears to have been the group that helped pay for Abdo’s attorney, James Branum, who is also apparently a fan of Zachari Klawonn.

Which brings up an interesting point. It appears Chris Rodda’s previous posturing about the connection between Abdo and Klawonn was precisely that — posturing. The Jawa Report indicates Klawonn was a “person of interest” in the Abdo case, which, while completely unverified, also isn’t unreasonable given the parallel paths of the Abdo and Klawonn stories over the past year and their recent coverage in the media. Being a “person of interest” means little, of course, except that law enforcement is interested in talking to the person.

So while Rodda feigned offense, it seems a foregone conclusion Zachari Klawonn — and thus Michael Weinstein — would have ultimately been in the press in this incident. It is now public knowledge that Weinstein personally talked to Abdo — who even then was widely known to have been claiming his Islamic beliefs were inconsistent with US military service. To be clear, Abdo repeatedly said the US military, not service in war. Thus, he was not a true conscientious objector, as has been pointed out before. His statements were consistent with those made by Maj Nidal Malik Hasan, who advised another Muslim not to join the military not because of an objection to war, but because of an objection to Muslims serving in the US military:

[Hasan] said Muslims shouldn’t be in the U.S. military, because obviously Muslims shouldn’t kill Muslims. He told me not to join the Army.

Any Muslim who knows his religion or maybe takes into account what his religion says can find out very clearly why he should not participate in the U.S. military.

When Weinstein found out Abdo was claiming the same thing as Hasan, instead of demanding his court-martial, Weinstein said nothing. Of course, when he spoke about Hasan, Weinstein couldn’t pass on the opportunity to imply Christians were somehow responsible for his actions. Perhaps Weinstein hadn’t yet figured out a way to blame Christians for Abdo’s angst.

Nearly a year later, with an apparent terror attack nearly come to fruition, Weinstein can do no more than mutter “We just never felt good about him.” Of course, it would sound self-indicting to now say Abdo should have been “aggressively and immediately court-martialed.”

As an interesting aside, all recent references to the relationship between the MRFF and Klawonn, including those by Rodda, have been in the past tense.

7 comments

Knock it off, JD! There is no big relationship between Mikey, MRFF, or Zachari Klawonn and Abdo, and you know it. As has been made public, and I have explained myself on JD’s other post where he tried to manufacture a relationship that just does not exist, Abdo contacted MRFF last summer, but we did not take his case. And, the only contact between Zachari Klawonn and Abdo was because Zachari, besides being a MRFF client himself, was acting as a volunteer liaison for MRFF. Part of the reason that MRFF did not take Abdo as a client was that Zachari advised against it after speaking to him. Of course Zachari would be a “person of interest.” The authorities are obviously wanting to talk to anyone who spoke to Abdo, and MRFF has made it known that we, including Zachari, did have contact with him. That’s it. End of story.

As for me referring to Zachari in the past tense, it’s just because he’s now out of the Army so he’s not an active duty MRFF client anymore, so I said he “was” a client, because he “was” at the time he spoke to Abdo. JD, of course, loves to insinuate that MRFF has had many fallings out with various people and organizations, even though he has absolutely no idea what goes on in MRFF’s relationships with anybody. There is absolutely no problem whatsoever between Zachari and Mikey or MRFF, so everybody please ignore JD’s insinuations.